Saturday, March 29, 2014

Telekom-Green Packet: The weird world of Malaysian telcos

Remember years ago when Telekom Malaysia (TM) had TM Touch? They were going nowhere and for TM to have a significant mobile business and successful one, the forced (sort of) purchase was planned. After the purchase of Celcom from Tajuddin Ramli, years later it was split again, presumably for Celcom and its mobile business to have a solid Asian strategy, hence Axiata.

TM on the other hand, was given a lot of handouts in the form of financial assistance for its fiber broadband rollout - to the tune of multi billions. With that handout, few would think that TM can fail. In fact when Celcom and other mobile businesses were split from TM, these mobile group was structured to owe TM something like RM4 billion, another assistance to TM.

TM should not and cannot fail, just like MAS. The difference between MAS and TM is that MAS is fighting globally competitive players. TM is given a headstart in any of the competition it goes into, something like standing on the 50 meters mark in a 100m race while the rest will have to start from the beginning.

Who will think TM will succeed in the mobile data business acquiring Green Packet? I don't.

In a standing start against players like Maxis, Celcom, Digi - it will pretty much lose, what more coming from behind although it has the backbone of fiber optics - something that the others lose out to TM.

In a business of telco, it is not just the infra. Tell that to Digi, which does lose out in infra - even for the LTE spectrum and it did not even have the 3G spectrum earlier - forced to a deal with Time Dotcom.

This deal does not help anybody but to postpone the demise of Green Packet while another player whom are not able turnaround anybody is thinking that it can. SK Telekom's name is just a convenient partner to bring the story line sounds better. After all, it has been with Green Packet for many years and nothing really happened.

Disclaimer

The content here should serve as the opinion of the writer rather than as an advice to buy or sell. You should do your own research and/or seek expert's advice when doing your investments. Any decision that you made is your own and the author should not be held accountable.